I feel like a theme of this blog thus far has been “I’m trying something new with my life!” Which is probably appropriate for the blog of a writer in her 20s, and I’ve done some pretty cool things in the last few years, but I would like to transition into more of a theme of stability sometime in the next century. To that end, the new new thing I’ve doing with my life is about to be teaching. Starting essentially simultaneously, I will be embarking upon two lit teaching jobs for the summer, one online for elementary school kids and one in person for a huge range of ages. Long term job? Not yet. But maybe this time, that’s the road I’m starting down.

Obviously, I already have a long term job, which is writing. (Actually, when speaking to my mom recently about all my friends who are obtaining shiny new degrees and professions, I remarked, “Everyone’s becoming what they’re going to be.” Without missing a beat, my mom immediately replied, “Well, you’ve been what you’re going to be for a long time. You’re a writer.” In conclusion, my mom is amazing and every creatively-inclined individual should be so lucky.) But I also want to have a long term, also beloved day job, and I’m pretty sure that teaching will fit that bill. I’ve been a TA, a private tutor, a camp counselor, and even a home school English teacher, and now it’s time for me to get in front of my own class and see what happens.

When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was talk about books. Of course, that’s still all I want to do. As a rule, I’ve been pretty consistent in the things I love. That’s how I was able to realize so early in life that I wanted to be a writer. I’m not sure why it’s taken me until now to commit to my other love of literary analysis and teaching as a career path. I guess it’s always seemed a little daunting to teach and write at the same time, since both require a lot of energy. I never wanted to shortchange my writing. I still don’t; no matter what, I need to make sure that writing remains a top priority in my life.

However, I think that it will be easier to commit myself to my writing when the rest of my time is also spent doing things that I love. Passion requires energy, sure, but it also gives it back to you. That’s what I’m betting on, anyway. So here’s to this new experiment! If I can’t have stability yet, at least I can have fun.

When people ask about my writing process, I doubt the answer they’re expecting to get is, “well, first I write 10 to 15 chapters that just don’t work at all, then I scrap those, start over, and write an entire first draft that also doesn’t work at all, but in a different way.” This seems to be the case for me, though, and I’ve just completed what I now think of as the Obligatory False Start on my long-neglected middle grade story. When I tell people this, they also don’t seem to expect me to be happy about it, but I am. It feels like progress. Now the real work can begin.

Before I jump back into the inevitably shitty first draft, I’ve been doing some research, which is always fun. So much fun, actually, that I almost felt guilty doing it — surely there was some more arduous and therefore productive way I could be spending my time? But nope, that’s the best thing about being a writer: sometimes work and play are indistinguishable. Of course, not everyone would consider reading roughly 600 pages of Ancient Mesopotamian poetry (as I did over the last two weeks) to be “play,” but hey, we all have our eccentricities.

(A note on Ancient Mesopotamian poetry: some of it will definitely be discarded from the “useful research” pile on account of being too brutal not only for my target middle-grade audience, but also humanity in general. Those of you who’ve read my YA work may have some idea of what it would take to get me to say this. YIKES, Mesopotamia.)

So now I’m ready to jump into a project that is once again drastically different from previous works. The Children’s War is a high fantasy (???) upper-YA beginning of a trilogy with four revolving close-third POVs. Misbegotten Creatures is also upper-YA fantasy, but a semi-futuristic alternate universe science fantasy written in the first person. Writing MC felt so incredibly different from writing TCW that I sometimes felt like I was writing a first novel all over again. So many of the things I learned writing TCW were inapplicable to MC, and I had to learn so many new things for MC that had never come up in TCW.

(I’m making a conscious effort to use the actual titles of my completed(ish) manuscripts because professionalism, I guess? Middle-grade story has a title but will remain “middle-grade story” until at least after the shitty first draft.)

So of course after all of the frustration of writing a second first novel, I am now going to write a third first novel. I started this work in grad school (actually, a precursor short story happened in undergrad), but I’ve never written a complete work of middle-grade fiction before. I know for a fact that my first draft is going to be about a million words too long, and that won’t be the only challenge. I predict a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth will accompany the first several drafts, while I curse myself for not sticking to what I’ve already gone through all the trouble of figuring out.

But we all know that deep down, I don’t want to do that at all.

Don’t get me wrong, I am dying (in what sometimes feels like a literal way) to write The Children’s War’s next two books. I need to finish that story. (And I will. Someday, someday, I will get to do that.) I also feel like YA is likely to be my main home over the course of what I hope will be a long career. But I don’t want my body of work to be like an album where all the songs sound the same. I want to write vastly different books. I want to be frustrated and afraid that I’ll never get it right, because no one ever enjoyed the thrill of discovery without feeling scared first.

And hopefully this post will remind me of that in a couple months, when I’m contemplating throwing my laptop out the window.

Today, instead of waking up at a frankly unseemly hour of the morning and commuting directly and dangerously into the rising sun, I instead began my first week as an AmeriCorps alumna instead of an AmeriCorps member. My unexpected life detour into disaster recovery has come to an end. It was a pretty bumpy road at times, but I’m glad I took it. I was able to help some people along the way, which is really all I wanted out of this experience.

I also met some really lovely people. I keep making mental notes of topics of conversation to bring up in the office, forgetting that I don’t actually work there anymore. I mean, I’ll be back there at some point, possibly to borrow their scanner and also to return the traffic cones I inadvertently stole. Also, social media is a thing. Still, it’s always strange when you see someone every day — whether a classmate, a roommate, or a coworker — and then you suddenly don’t.

“Abrupt change” has been sort of a theme of my life the last couple of years, I guess. Like I said in my last post (which was almost two months ago — so much for New Year’s resolutions, whoops), I do have some constants, though. Writing, of course, is my greatest constant, and I’m excited that I’ll have some more time to do so now.

I also have plenty of Plans, but none of them are quite Reality yet, so that can wait for a future post. Writing is my Reality, though. It’s maybe strange that something as intangible as making up stories out of thin air can be as solid a bedrock as it is for me. I just appreciate having an area of my life that I don’t have to question. I’m not sure where my writing will take me, but I’m sure about the writing itself. I know I’m very lucky to have that.

For now, I’m going to be working fewer money-making-job hours than I had been (though I’ll be earning considerably more, because AmeriCorps), so lots of people have been asking me what I’m going to do with my “free time.” This has got me thinking about when I stopped thinking of writing as “free time” and when I started thinking of it as my job. The switch must have happened pretty gradually, because I can’t pinpoint an exact moment. But yeah — I’m not actually going to have any more free time than I ever did. I’ll just get to use more of my work time to do the job that I love the most.

And someday, I hope, I’ll be able to say the same thing about my writing as I can say about my AmeriCorps term: “I really helped some people with this.” I definitely never felt sure of myself as a disaster case manager the way I do as a writer. I actually spent a pretty large portion of my 10-month term thinking I was kind of awful at it. If I could go and tell myself one thing at the beginning of my term, it would be to try to get out of my own head occasionally. Of course, I’m fundamentally incapable of doing this literally ever, so the advice wouldn’t have done much, but I do realize that people in need don’t need the people helping them to be perfect. They just need them to keep trying. That’s something I did do, and that’s something I’m proud of.

One of the tenets of the organization I worked for was that people have an innate desire to help others. While that’s hard to fit in with some of the contractor fraud I saw (some people will literally steal tens of thousands of dollars from children and little old ladies after their houses are destroyed! So that’s a thing!), I genuinely think that’s true of most of us. I also think that if someone is anxious or prone to guilt due to personality or brain chemistry or latent childhood religion (or all three, in which case hello and welcome to the Existential Crisis Club!), then they probably worry that they don’t help enough.

At my AmeriCorps class’s graduation party (bowling! Which I actually really enjoyed — maybe I’ll follow in my mother and grandmother’s footsteps and become an Intense Bowler), my bosses and coworkers made speeches about us, which was emotionally overwhelming and embarrassing but also really gratifying. So, I guess if I were to actually arrive at a point in this meandering post, it would be that I encourage you to go and emotionally overwhelm/embarrass someone who’s helped you in your life. Tell them what they did was good and enough. Because while (good) people don’t help others for the recognition, letting them know they’re appreciated is an easy and kind way of turning it around and helping them in return.

So there’s my sappy moral. That’s the end of my free time for the morning. Now: to write.

Once I went on a tour of a butterfly sanctuary. Jewel-bright insects of all shapes and sizes meandered through the air beneath the glass ceiling of the habitat as the tour guide explained the facts of the butterflies’ brief lives. He pointed out a chrysalis.

“Everyone knows that caterpillar makes a cocoon, and after a while, a butterfly emerges,” he said. “What most people don’t know is that, in order to become a butterfly, the caterpillar’s body LIQUEFIES.”

Here he paused for dramatic emphasis, but he really didn’t have to. My eyes were already bugging out of my head (no pun intended) as I stared at the hard and withered-looking chrysalis. I was horrified and delighted in equal measures. I spent the rest of the day repeating this fact to anyone who would listen to me. It’s still one of my favorite nature facts, just because it really doesn’t seem like it should be possible at all. Complex bodies shouldn’t be able to disintegrate and reconstitute into something else entirely, should they? Yet the evidence was all around me, wings flexing lazily, no trace of the gooey mess they had once been.

I’ve thought about the liquefied pre-butterflies a lot this year. Obviously, their behavior is driven by instinct, and I know better than to anthropomorphize bugs to the point where I project existential angst onto them. Still, the whole liquefaction deal can’t exactly be pleasant, can it? You spend all that time chowing down on leaves and either camouflaging or looking poisonous (successfully, if you’re lucky), then suddenly: bloop. Life is a weird time for caterpillars is basically what I’m saying here.

I sympathized with this weirdness in 2015. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it was a bad year. It was just kind of bizarre. I spent a lot of time feeling as muddled and discombobulated as caterpillar soup. “Quarter-life crisis” became a fixture of my vocabulary. It was the first full year of my life not spent as a student, and with that structure gone, I felt strangely diffuse. It was a year of impermanence: I started it in the middle of Hermit Life, then moved home for a month, then became an AmeriCorps member. That chapter of my life will end in two months, too. In that way, I’ve ended 2015 the same way I began it: without knowing what comes next.

A quick consultation with Google has informed me that some cells survive the liquefaction stage of metamorphosis. They’re called imaginal discs and they are the foundation on which the adult body will be built. This is almost unbearably poetic and I can’t resist running with the symbolism for a moment here. Those of us who are lucky will have some imaginal discs of our own, the constants that survive whatever unforeseen changes we’re forced to go through.

Good family and good friends are the most important constants a person can have, and I’m grateful to say I have both. Even if I’m flailing about in a sea of existential confusion, they’re never confused about who I am. I hope that they would count me among their constants, as well.

Another imaginal disc that is as hardwired into my being as a butterfly’s antennae is my writing. There have been plenty of times this year when I didn’t really feel like a real writer. I’ve been pretty isolated from the literary world, which is something I want to work on this year. I’m no longer attending degree-mandated workshops and readings. Meanwhile, in the “hurry-up-and-wait” career path of a writer, I’ve been squarely in the “wait” portion all year. Which is normal. Which I’ve always known is how things work. Which I accepted a long time ago.

Which is still hard sometimes.

However! I grew so much as a writer this year. Werewolf story and I continued wrestling one another until finally we were dancing. I tackled the challenge of being a writer with a non-writing 8-to-5 job and, even though it proved to be predictably exhausting, I got some pretty great work in during my lunch breaks, if I do say so myself. Even if my passion was invisible to most of the people around me for many months, it was still there. It was becoming something.

I’m so goddamn proud of werewolf story. I did right by my monsters. I let them become something, too.

The caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly metaphor for growth is very old and tired, but once you know the gruesome biological details, it seems even more appropriate. That in-between stage can be very disorienting. But this year, I will continue building myself around my imaginal discs, the parts of me that always were and always will be. That way, whatever emerges from my uncertainty will be a self that I will recognize and like. Anyone else who had a weird 2015, and I know a lot of you did, I believe that you can do the same!

So that’s enough navel-gazing for now. (It’s New Year’s, I’m allowed.) Another one of my resolutions is to blog more, so hopefully this dusty old page will see a lot more of me in 2016. I hope there will be some exciting things to report!

The line between a diary and a blog can be a thin one. As you can tell by the time between my posts on here, I’m not very good at blogging in general yet, and while I journaled for a while as a kid, my efforts would always trail off. I’ve always been far more motivated to write fiction, but sometimes I think I could stand for addressing my mental state in writing somewhat more directly, as opposed to foisting it all off on my poor characters (sorry, darlings). It’s been a very introspective year for me. I’ve been discovering a lot of important things about myself, which has been accompanied by all the hysteria-edged agony that self-discovery usually carries with it. I recently wrote down a bunch of these frustrations and mood swings and intended to post them here, but then I realized: nope. That’s a diary entry, not a blog post. It was useful to me, but surely not interesting to literally anyone else.

So there’s another self-discovery. I’ve always considered myself a bit of an oversharer, but apparently I do have some boundaries. Good to know.

However, one thing that I did talk about in that diary entry was my current all-consuming love of the musical HAMILTON. If you haven’t listened to the soundtrack, go and do so right this very instant. I’ll wait. . . . Welcome back. I’m going to assume two and a half hours have now passed and that your life has been completely transfigured by this mind-blowing masterpiece. Everyone who has listened to HAMILTON, please share all of your thoughts and feelings about it with me. I’m not kidding at all.

The HAMILTON soundtrack came at exactly the right time for me. I recently became the sole case manager at work, since my coworker’s term ended and the person set to replace her rescinded at the last minute. Literally a day before this happened, I finished the most recent draft of werewolf story. My media consumption always sees a brief uptick in the weeks after finishing a draft, since I like to take a brief brain break before starting in on the next one. Of course, due to the doubling of my work load, my “brain break” has been anything but. Yet that’s exactly why the media I’ve consumed in the last three weeks has been so important. With my own quarter life crisis raging, I’ve clung onto the stability that a really, really good story can provide.

It may seem odd to consider something that’s made me cry as much as HAMILTON as a mood stabilizer. (“It’s Quiet Uptown,” oh my god, don’t even look at me.) But hey, that’s what Aristotle was on about with that whole catharsis thing, no? Not to defer too much to old dead dude philosophers, but it’s true that borrowing the troubles of fictional (or in this case, fictionalized historical) characters has always been an important way for me to deal with my own. It’s not just about emotional purgation, though; I also need to borrow the Deep Thoughts of a good story when my mind is overrun with self-absorbed worries. HAMILTON has me covered there, too, with all its themes about the ways personal legacies and national identities are formed and skewed by history (which people who’ve read story will recognize as My Favorite Topics).

None of these observations about the healing powers of stories are new, as evidenced by the fact that I cited freaking Aristotle. I’ve known how much I need stories since I knew anything about myself at all. But in the last few weeks, I’ve rediscovered it. I’ve read five books back to back. Two were rereads (Melina Marchetta’s FINNIKIN OF THE ROCK and Kristen D. Randle’s THE ONLY ALIEN ON THE PLANET) and three were books I picked up for the first time (Nancy Farmer’s THE EAR, THE EYE AND THE ARM, E. Lockhart’s WE WERE LIARS, and Jacqueline Woodson’s HUSH). I couldn’t put any of them down. Meanwhile, HAMILTON has been my constant chores-and-commuting soundtrack. (“The Battle of Yorktown” is better than a shot glass of straight caffeine for morning commutes. You just have to be careful not to start speeding.) I have needed and been grateful for every word (and in HAMILTON’s case, every note) of these works of art.

I’ve taken a longer break than usual between drafts this time. Usually I’m back to the grindstone within about a week and a half. It’s been three weeks now, and I’m just getting ready to get down to work now. There are a few reasons for this. One is that werewolf story has been a very personal and difficult project in a lot of ways. I often jokingly refer to it as “the therapy book,” in keeping with the Intense Work On Myself that has characterized my mid-20s. I kind of needed a long time to exhale after this draft. The more straightforward second reason, obviously, is the whole doubling of the workload at the day job situation. I am a tired little writer person over here, friends.

The third reason, though, is something that a lot of writers-with-day-jobs will recognize. I won’t be able to read as much once I’m back to my work-write-repeat schedule. I mean, at least I still have to clean and commute, so I still get to listen to HAMILTON one million more times. But reading is one of the greatest joys of my life, and I don’t get to do nearly as much of it as I’d like. World’s tiniest violin? Maybe. But sometimes I really do need those mood stabilizing effects of a good story that I didn’t have to put all the hard work into writing.

Still, if reading is joy, then writing is more than joy. It’s everything. It’s the love of my life. And I will pick myself up out of my exhaustion and existential meebling to keep doing it, because I want to produce stories that have the same effects on others as other people’s stories have on me. I want to strike cathartic wounds into people’s hearts, so that my readers look up from my words feeling both cleaner and fuller. I want to dash away their personal anxieties by occupying them with the Deep Thoughts I’ve poured into my books. I want to exercise their souls.

My best friend was instrumental in much of the development of werewolf story, a.k.a. MISBEGOTTEN CREATURES. She already knows it’s dedicated to her, although she didn’t get to read it until I finished the most recent draft three weeks ago. The revisions she suggested were spot on, because she is a wildly talented editor and knows exactly how to make books better. The personal reactions she told me? Those were nothing short of life-affirming. Apparently, the desires I listed above are not pipe dreams. I can write stories that are important to other people. Not only that, I can write stories that are important to the people that are important to me. Can you imagine anything better? I can’t. Quietly, in the midst of a strange and confusing year, one of my dreams came true.

I may be tired and worried and frustrated, but I’m going to make the rest of my dreams come true, too. I may have to go back to reading at a snail’s pace for a while, but only because, to quote HAMILTON, I’ll be writing “like I need it to survive.” Because I do. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am a lucky writer person, friends. Not only do I have a wonderful, dedicated agent in Carrie Howland, I also get to share her with a bunch of really talented fellow writers. One of them, Dionna L. Mann, has taken it upon herself to write up thoughtful, personalized interview questions for a bunch of us and host a Team Howland Blog Party on her website.

In her own words: “Dionna L. Mann is a spinner of children’s yarns, a weaver of nonfiction articles, and a forever-learner enrolled in the Institute of Imaginative Thinking. As a SCBWI member since 2005, she has placed work with Highlights for Children and Ladybug. As a freelance writer, she writes human-interest articles for Charlottesville Family Magazine, a Parent’s Choice winner. She is represented by Carrie Howland of Donadio & Olson, Inc. She can be found online at dionnalmann.com.”

Definitely check out Dionna’s site to learn more about her and a bunch of other members of Team Howland! When I signed on with Carrie back in the fall, I was so ecstatic just to have an agent that I never even imagined the instant support system I would gain in the rest of her authors. They found me immediately and have been so kind ever since. I know I need to be more proactive in talking to them, to be honest. (I kind of need to be more proactive in talking to a lot of people in my life right now — overwhelming busyness is an explanation for being a little withdrawn lately, but it’s not an excuse!) Luckily, Dionna’s made that really easy for me!

I’ve met lots of different types of writers in my day. Some can be awfully competitive, but I’ve found the ones who produce the best work are also the ones who always have other writers’ backs. I think that people who truly love working with language and crafting stories are naturally excited to find other people who feel the same way. I know that I want everyone in Team Howland to have success, and it warms my heart to know that they feel the same way about me. So hooray for Dionna, hooray for Team Howland, and hooray for Carrie for bringing us all together!

LONG TIME NO SEE, BLOG. Figuring out my new job and whipping werewolf story into shape have left me with little time for literally anything else. I’m trying to nail down the whole work-life balance thing, I swear. I’m just . . . not very good at it yet. I’m assuming I’ll get it right just about the time my AmeriCorps term ends. Although I have gone swimming (and introduced a friend to ~the Atlantic Ocean~) so I haven’t taken my beach-side location totally for granted. (Beach writing is still the best.)

Meanwhile, I’m a third of the way into The Readable Draft of werewolf story (so far, it’s still worthy of that title), and I’m looking forward to finally sharing this work with some people. Werewolf story doesn’t really have a romantic origin story; I just needed a new project to work on for school. I needed to write a proposal and I didn’t have any ideas yet. I sat down in the living room of my Cambridge apartment with a sketchbook, stared at the wall, and thought, “Well, what are things that I like?” The obvious and immediate answer was “werewolves.” I began to meditate on the concept of lycanthropy while I drew random things in my sketchbook. Before long, I had two pictures of two very different girls, and I knew that they were both werewolves. (Artistically, both of these pictures are super ugly. I’m pretty decent at drawing from life, but awful at sketching from my head. But that’s not the point.)

I immediately wrote down two pages of intro material in a voice that is hilariously different from what I wound up with. But I had two characters and the barest foundation of world-building. By the time I wrote my proposal, I had not much else (though I pretended I did, and luckily that paid off in being paired with a great mentor). The first draft, naturally, was horrific. I guess about 1.5 scenes have sort of remained from then, albeit still heavily altered? That seems to be my average for that sort of thing. But in that one draft, werewolf story had gone from a project I needed for my degree to a book-to-be that I loved.

Werewolf story and story are so technically different that I really didn’t get to coast much on what I’d learned from writing story. Instead, werewolf story has sort of been “Teach Yourself to Write a Novel: Take Two.” But I’ve been thinking a lot how, for all their differences, they’re both super, super obviously from the pen of an American millennial. Story has always been my way of working through questions I had when I myself was a teenager, whereas werewolf story is clearly a product of the concerns of my mid-twenties. (Or at least it’ll definitely be obvious to the people who know me; sometimes when I’m revising, I can’t help but think at myself, “oh, YOU WOULD.”) I’ve realized that a central question in both of them (though I approach it in very different ways) is “can I still do good if I’m a product of a bad system?”

Spoiler alert: I believe the answer is yes. I wouldn’t write about it if I didn’t.

So I shall continue being exhausted and worried and confused like a proper millennial, but I will remind myself that even though I don’t really feel in charge of my own life very often these days, I am in charge of the stories I tell. Which, to me, is sort of the same thing.

I have officially survived my first two weeks of my new 10-month service venture. Everyone on all the different teams in the organization seems terribly nice and I have not been nearly as shy around them as I was afraid I would be. Apparently hermit life hasn’t completely destroyed my ability to interact with others. Also, the more I learn about this organization, the more sure I am that I have made the right decision about what to do for the next 10 months. I’m even already starting to take on Responsibilities, despite the fact that the first week was orientation, so I’ve only had one week of training so far, and I also have zero experience in anything I’m doing.

As a newly minted client services coordinator, I have literally been dreaming every night about grants and insurance and loans. I expect to be completely mummified in red tape soon. Part of my job — apparently a fairly sizable part, too — will be telling people no. No, you don’t qualify. No, we can’t help you. This will suck for me but suck a whole lot worse for them. In a weird way, that’s motivating me. My frustration will be nothing compared to the people still rebuilding after a natural disaster that happened two and a half years ago. Even when I have to say no, I’m hoping I will also be able to say why. Maybe, if nothing else, I’ll be able to clear up some of the agonizing confusion.

Of course, that means I have a whole lot of learnin’ to do myself. Early in the week, I found myself falling back on grad school strategies: “Don’t just take notes on it if you still don’t know what it means,” I told myself several times. I kind of enjoy squinting at the computer screen with a skeptical eye, trying to determine if a) the text makes sense and b) I agree with it. I always did love school, but now the stakes are higher than just my own grades.

A couple of times, the topic of “rose-colored glasses” was raised — as in, make sure you’re not wearing them. I’m really not, but some people may l think that I am, because there is nothing that can stop me from being blazingly, doggedly, indefatigably optimistic about the work I’m about to do. Optimism is very often conflated with naivete, but to me, they couldn’t be more different. Rose-colored glasses are for the naive. Optimists are the people who look straight at the hard truths of a situation and say, “Yep, we can work with this.” Optimists do not deny pain. They also do not deny joy.

Writing off positivity and hope as some sort of illusion is just as unrealistic a worldview as pretending that negativity and hardship do not exist. I know because I have done both. As a child, I knew that there were some bad people and bad circumstances. I have always felt and thought deeply about the suffering of others, even before I’d lost my first baby teeth. (I was a kind of intense kid.) But I assumed that suffering was by and large a rarity. I assumed that all problems could and would be fixed by the adults of the world. I projected my parents’ goodness onto everyone, and therefore I thought that nothing could stay very bad for long. As a children’s lit person, I don’t mean to imply that all children are naive. But I was, and I’m glad I was, because it stemmed from being loved and protected and safe.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I swung the other way completely, and that was by brain chemistry, not choice. By the time this happened, I was nearing the end of college. Obviously at this point, I wasn’t as naive as I had been at age six, but I still had great faith in humanity — a faith that vanished seemingly overnight. Suddenly I thought that no disaster could be prevented, and every person on Earth was simply rushing towards a series of unavoidable catastrophes that would eventually claim them. Simply put, I found myself believing in the doctrine of “nasty, brutish, and short.” I’d pass a stroller and pity the baby for having been born. I’d sit next to a stranger on the bus and envy them their ignorance of the hellscape I was convinced was about to unfold.

You’ll often hear people say that if you expect the worst, you will be pleasantly surprised by a better outcome, but I found nothing pleasant about pessimism at all. I didn’t even feel like I was myself anymore — and, as a pessimist, I did not believe I could get myself back.

And then I proved myself wrong.

My optimism these days is not about platitudes or blind faith. My optimism is fierce and furious. I didn’t solve the problem of my own despair just to leave other people in theirs. So I will believe the best can happen because I am going to make it happen. And when I personally can’t be the one to make it happen, I will put my trust in the other optimists of the worlds, the ones who stave off helplessness and hopelessness by working as hard as they goddamn can because that’s the only way they know how to live. These are the people who, like me, would much rather be disappointed by a bad outcome than never even trying to make something good happen.

I know these people are out there. I just joined a whole organization of them. I don’t need rose-colored glasses to see that.

So you know all of that stuff I was whining about in my last entry? Well, it’s been (temporarily) resolved! And there was much rejoicing throughout the land. By which I mean I rejoiced, and so did all the people who no longer have to listen to me having daily existential crises. I am currently sitting at my kitchen table (what’s up, Habitat for Humanity ReStore) in my new apartment, exactly one week out from beginning a new job working with homeowners still rebuilding after Hurricane Sandy. A great deal of frustrating paperwork is in my future, and I’m pretty pumped about it. The job itself will only last for ten months, but I’ll be leaving with that magical entity known as EXPERIENCE. Hopefully some people will have moved back into their houses in that time, too, which is definitely the most exciting part of this venture.

Meanwhile, the latest draft of werewolf story is going well. I feel like with each passing draft of any project, I sink deeper into new emotional territory for my characters, to the point where all previous drafts suddenly seem terribly shallow. Also, now that I’m thinking about it, I always also worry that I won’t be able to sustain the heightened intensity. This morning, I was wondering if I’d dialed things up to 11 too soon, but now I realize that I thought the same thing at the start of the most recent rewrite of story, and that was not the case. So I’m going to stop worrying about that now. That’s a relief! Thanks, blog therapy!

Now I’ll just have to make sure I make plenty of time to write despite the longer hours I’ll be working soon. This will definitely be challenging, but I do have a few things going for me. One: my apartment gets a ton of light, which makes it ideal for a solar-powered creature such as myself. (I’m blissfully in love with this apartment.) Two: my new job is literally across the street from the ocean, which means BEACH WRITING, WOO.

If I let myself, there are a thousand things I can start fretting about with regards to writing and the new job and Health Stuff (always the Health Stuff, sigh), but I’ve done so much fretting in the last two months that I just refuse to do it right now. Right at this moment in my life, I am listening to music and looking out the window at a cherry tree that’s about to bloom. There is a basil plant on the table, books on my shelves, and monster teens in my head. I have a helping people job and a place to call my own. I haven’t cracked the whole future plans thing yet, but the present is pretty damn good.

Now that hermit life is coming to an end, I am naturally feeling reflective. A short but important phase of my life will soon be over. It is, notably, the last phase of my life that came pre-planned, which means that on top of reflective, I am also feeling utterly terrified. When experiencing either of those emotions, I find it is a good idea to make lists. So here is a list of things I accomplished during hermit life:

I got an agent! A really cool agent whom I will hopefully get to meet in person after hermit life. This happened at the beginning of hermit life, which I took as a sign that this whole weird live-in-the-woods idea was the right thing to be doing, because I am extremely prone to magical thinking. This was also the crowning achievement of 2014, which I’m beginning to think of as “the year I made a lot of really cool things happen.”

I completed a set of revisions for story at the behest of said agent. I absolutely marathoned that work, which made me feel busy and slightly frantic and very writerly. I love the feeling of making a story I love better.

I submitted myself to getting my ass kicked by werewolf story enough times that it finally got tired and allowed me to wrestle it into a draft that I can (finally) work with. I finished this draft last week, thereby completing my Last Writing Goal of Hermit Life.

I survived a mouse infestation, a poor dying snake, the absence of all sunlight for the entire month of December, unbearably cold temperatures, getting my car stuck in a snow bank (twice), my pipes freezing (twice), and the aforementioned six-month-long ass kicking by werewolf story.

Here is a list of things I did not accomplish during hermit life:

Figuring out what I’m going to do after hermit life.

So, whoops.

In my defense, it’s not for lack of trying. I have submitted oh so very many job applications, and I will be continuing to do so as soon as I finish this blog post. (And actually, I can also add “went to a ridiculous amount of trouble to get to an interview that turned out to be a complete bust” to the list of things I survived.) I am trying awfully hard to mold a shape for my immediate future. But unfortunately, at the moment, it remains a void.

So this means that Awkward Home Summer will have a reprise in Awkward Home Early Spring, but while I hope a new job comes quickly, if it doesn’t, I won’t be waiting around too long to move somewhere else. I’ll need to, because in a lot of ways, hermit life was completely successful. I knew that I needed some time away from the world after grad school, that I wasn’t yet ready to take on all aspects of Real Adulthood. I am now, though. I want a semi-permanent place to live (or at least general location), a social life again, a love life even, and a non-writing-paid-job that I feel is contributing to the world in some positive way. I’m ready. But all of these new beginnings sort of hinge on finding the last item in that list, and that’s what I haven’t managed to do yet.

It is very frustrating to be ending something without beginning something else.

And I know it will happen, because something has to happen and I’m going to make it happen. I just don’t know when. So that’s unpleasant. Also, the “positive contribution” part is another thing I hate waiting on, as you’ve probably gleaned from my last post if you read it or from my general desperate existential anxiety if you’ve had any sort of conversation with me in 2015. In a beautiful ideal world, I would be a paid writer with time to do volunteer work, but writing + paid job + substantial volunteer work = no sleep for Kathleen, so I’m trying to squish the last two parts of that equation together. (General plea: if you know any nonprofits or really positive for profits looking for entry level workers remotely near New York or Philly or anywhere in New Jersey or I’ll take some Connecticut too, and you can put in a good word for me because I have literally zero networking connections, let me knooooow.) (I’ll love you for eternity and be forever in your debt if you know of something even tangentially related to the environment.) (Or schools, too.)

So that’s where I am: frustrated and anxious about all areas of my life — except for writing. And that’s where I find comfort, because I knew I wouldn’t switch it. I couldn’t switch it, because I could not possibly be content about any aspect in my life if I’m not giving my all to writing. While I always wish I had more time to write, I know that I have spent hermit life working as hard as I could to produce work I am very proud of. In the void of my future, I at least have a direction for werewolf story (research computer hacking, plant biology, and corporate accounting, and then start a new draft that (sob!) cuts one of the secondary characters). And no matter what I wind up doing next, I have other stories waiting for me to write them.